How can we help you more? – A strategy for the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society.

The GRSS Administrative Committee has recently finished a new review of its strategic planning which occurs every five years. The focus of this cycle is to provide the membership with improved benefits and more access to technical and professional information. The Society is convinced that service to the broader remote sensing community and to the membership are both critical to advancing geoscience and remote sensing. The Society includes the following objectives in its updated strategic plan:

1. Provide leadership at the edge of science, technology, and applications.
   
   
2. Provide effective educational/training/communication
   
   
3. Develop new operational business models that allow the society to respond to appropriate value propositions for the future
   
   
4. Expand our ability to deliver member and community services especially in selected communities that strategically impact the future
   
   
5. Recognize and implement systemic behavior that ensures our relevance to societal issues
   
   What this means is that there will be more support to our members for their professional needs and personal interests. We will be expanding beyond the well known International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARRS) to support topical workshops in remote sensing (see topical workshops in this website). We will expand our journal offerings with more focus on applications through a new Journal of Selected Topics Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (JSTARS). The new journal is currently in the approval process within IEEE TAB. We have also increased our offerings of tutorials and access to experts on the GRSS website. You are now able to ask questions of international leaders in the field of remote sensing and applications (see “ask an expert” on the technical resources tab of this site). In addition, our participation in IEEE Committee on Earth Observation and the more global GEOSS activities improves our ability to impact societal issues on an international scale.

As you can see, our new initiatives have been structured to provide improved services to the membership. We will continue to invest significant resources to improve web-based interfaces for both Adcom members and members of GRSS. We shall also look to locating IGARSS conferences to improve community access. We have increased the number of GRSS sponsored workshops and conferences. Finally we will restructure Adcom functionality to streamline effectiveness and improve our ability to deliver to the membership.

We encourage comments and suggestions from the membership to help us improve the process. Go to the forum page of this site and give us your thoughts.